SPEAKER_02
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Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. What's going on my first million listeners, this is Sam Parr. Today we have another special episode.
This episode is for trends members only. I know it stinks if you're not a subscriber, but what we're gonna do is give you 15 minutes or so of the episode for free. If you like it, you can go to trends.
co and sign up and listen to the rest of the episode. Or if you sign up for the hustle in your email, you'll see, we'll send you some show notes. So even if you're not a subscriber, you're gonna get some value.
But on trends.co, you'll get the full episode and transcription, and then you'll get access to community where this guest is actually a member of the community. But today's guest is Jack Butcher.
I met Jack in our trends community and I actually went to his house a few weeks ago. My wife and I went to his house and met up with him and his wife and Jack Butcher, I've met a lot of people in my business just because of, you know, it's with the media business who get to meet a lot of interesting folks. He's one of the more interesting folks because he's got such a great energy.
But basically his story is that Jack came to America at age 22 from England and then worked his way up where he worked in an agency as a designer and things were going okay, but he decided to start his own agency and it sucked. It was a lot of work. And it definitely paid the bills, but still it was a ton of work.
And so he started dabbling with some digital products where he launched this like a $19 daily planner on Gumroad. And it kind of took off. I mean, it opened his eyes to sales, to digital products.
And so he decided to do this thing where he productized his service and he created this course called Build Once, Sell Twice, the productization of ideas, I think it's called. And then he also created this other thing called Visualize Value, which is a design course that teaches you how to take concepts that are kind of complicated and put them in really digestible, easy to understand graphics. And I've paid him to do this with some of our stuff.
And it's just crazy fascinating. But he built this business to close to a million dollars a year in revenue in only 18 months. And so in this episode, I talked to Jack about courses that he's seeing out there that are awesome, that he loves, opportunities for content creators to build courses.
I talked to him about how he runs his course and what works and what doesn't. We also talk about the economics of the agency business and where some opportunity are is. And then we also talk about productization, productizing different services and what he sees as different opportunities that are out there.
It's an incredibly fascinating episode. I learned a lot, I think you guys will too. So check it out.
Again, you're gonna get the first few minutes, 15 minutes or so for free, but if you want the whole thing, go to trends.co and sign up and you'll see the rest of the episode. All right, so what, we're recording now.
Oh, good, you're drinking my drink, our drink now, I guess. We're mutual Heineken zero lovers. We should get that sponsorship rolling.
I know, I wish. I'm gonna put, so this podcast, what we're talking about right now, this is gonna be live on our main podcast feed and it'll get listened by a ton of people. And then we're gonna chop it up at one point and only trends members are gonna see it.
And so what I wanted to talk about today was some of your core stuff, but right now I've already written the blog posts and we're live now, we're recording. I've written the blog posts and what I've said about you is that, I don't know how I met you on Twitter or something in the group. I don't remember how I met you, but then we went and hung out in real life.
And I have to say, you're one of the more interesting people I've ever met. And your business is fascinating. The summary that I'll give and then I'll let you do all the talking is that you came from England at what, 22?
SPEAKER_00
21, I think, yeah.
SPEAKER_02
21, you did a bunch of part-time low-paying agency gigs, kind of worked your way up the totem pole a little bit. Eventually quit and you're like, I'm gonna start my own agency. You started your own agency and it did mildly well.
Like it paid the bills for sure, but it was a pain in the ass hard work. You hated it. You created a $19, like gum road thing on how to organize your thoughts and it did okay, but that kind of clicked for you.
And then you created this visualized value store course, whatever you want to call it, community. And you share your revenue numbers and 18 months in, you're in the ballpark of like 800 to a million a year in revenue. Yep. Great. What, I don't, I mean, I care a little bit about your journey, but tell me just like a little bit in your words, even though I'm doing all the talking for you.
SPEAKER_00
No, you got, it's a great overview. So the, all of the agency jobs kind of touched on a little bit of each part of the agency world. So I trained as a designer, came in as a designer on the bottom of the totem pole and you doing all the production work, doing all the stuff that nobody else wants to do.
So that's like working on pitch presentations, running around town, picking things up and doing all the stuff that is considered to low level for the executive team to get involved in. And went bounced around from like tiny agencies, big agencies, worked in-house at a startup for a little while, worked at Bloomberg for nine months on the design team there. And then got to, I think, a point in my agency career where I started to see the economics of the agency.
So I like climbed up enough for them to like show me the project, like the bill essentially that they were sending clients. And I was like, hang on a minute, you charging $30,000 to like design an email. It's like, if I could get one of these clients on my own, then I'm gonna be set.
But what I didn't realize is kind of an arrogant way to approach it is that there's all of this infrastructure and 12 people strategists and people that have to answer emails at the middle of the night and all that stuff. So jumped into that world and just quickly overwhelmed by all the stuff that wasn't first nature to me or the administration or the other stuff that comes with running a like complex service business. And then over the course of six to nine months started to dial in on the product side as a result of like starting an agency that was everything to everyone.
So we'll shoot car commercials, we'll build websites, we'll design apps, we'll do branding exercises. Then I just narrowed in the service mix to just do one thing. And that's how we met.
And if you recall was the presentation for the ideation bootcamp. And I just went all in on this idea of visualizing value, which was something that I did to acquire business. I was building pitch decks to basically win business.
And that was the asset that I would never get paid to make, but it would always get me a job. And then I was like, you know, Belle goes off and it's like, oh, maybe there's a market to just make these assets as the agency service. Then obviously you hit a limit there with the time.
And then started looking at how I could productize that skill set. And that's where the course product started to come from.
SPEAKER_02
So maybe we should break this conversation up. And I asked you to prepare a little bit with some course ideas. Maybe we should break this conversation.
I wanna learn about the agency business. I wanna learn about productizing a service. And I wanna learn about courses.
Where you, let's start with courses. So your business is like in the $800 to a million dollar range now, and this is all public, you tweet this out. Yeah, yeah.
With a lot of times with courses, I've got friends that have them and they like get big fast, but then they kind of teeter out. Do you think that's gonna happen with you?
SPEAKER_00
It may, what's interesting I think is the thing that brings in business for the course is like remaining relevant on the front end. So this is like my social presence in itself. I think the learnings that I'm producing as a result of the promoting the course go back into the course.
So it's like this self-fulfilling feedback loop. And while one of the courses is specific to design, the other one is about productization. So it feels to me like it has a longer runway because that is, you know, a, a huge, there's a huge market of people that have an incredible amount of knowledge or experience that they wanna turn into something that they can, you know, detach their time and income and sell repeatedly.
And the way I think about it is because that's not, even the design product, it's not riding a trend of a tactic or anything like that is gonna expire. So I figure as long as I stay ahead of the market, then I have a lot to share to people. There are a couple of steps behind me in that journey.
So my gut is I could, I could keep it running for a while.
SPEAKER_01
What's the end game?
SPEAKER_00
I think building the, like, building the media component of the company up a little more than it is now. So the courses sell as a result of the things that I'm producing in real time on social. So there's a pretty linear relationship between, you know, me making content and posting it on social and earning from the course.
So the end game is to just slowly increase, well, it's not an end game, but the target that's ahead, that's gonna stay ahead is in, like, decrease the amount of, like, daily creative input to sustain a certain volume of sales. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_02
So, but like, do you have a goal? Like, by 40, you wanna do, you wanna do something? Like, do you wanna sell this business? Do you wanna, do you have like a, kind of some of the-
SPEAKER_00
No, honestly, it's been just a process of doing less of what I don't wanna do over time. And I've kind of hit that point now where most days I'm doing what I wanna do. So, like, the goal thing always tends to put me on a path for a certain amount of time that I have to make some aggressive compromise or try and hit targets for some arbitrary reason.
So there is no, like, you know, five year, like, this is exactly what needs to happen. I think just optimizing for having a good time.
SPEAKER_02
You're living, you're just living.
SPEAKER_00
You're trying, trying, yeah.
SPEAKER_02
My friend Andrew, who, so we, this is only the second time that we've done this. And he was like, I just wanna figure out what makes me miserable and avoid it.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it's about spot on that's very articulately put.
SPEAKER_02
You, okay, were you able to think about this, this whole course thing? I imagine what you felt is what a lot of people feel, which is like, there's no way someone's gonna pay me money for this. Sure, yeah, 100%. What do you think is, where do you think are some, some interesting courses that are doing well? You told me about one that I'm gonna buy, actually.
So I take courses a lot. There's one on how to buy a luxury car at a discount and sell it after you drive it around for a year at a similar rate at what you purchased it for. That's a great example, yeah.
What the, how big is that one?
SPEAKER_00
How big is it? Yeah. I would think they're probably doing high six figures a year off that.
SPEAKER_01
What's it, what's that one called? Exotic car hacks, I think it's called. Yeah. God, that's brilliant.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so fascinating. The way that you get customers for that is you just have an exotic car Instagram handle or YouTube page, which is fun.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think those are the ones that tend to do well, right? Is when you have some way to promote it on the front end that's so naturally aligned to the course itself. And that's one of the reasons in hindsight why I think Visualize Value took off is you have this organic content engine on the front end where you can produce something. And someone's like, oh, that's cool.
I wanna learn how to make that. And then you can feed them into the product loop. So that's a huge part of making it sustainable and work the sell as a result of producing content on the front end.
So that I think is a trend and the exotic cars is a great example of that. You have something to point out that makes people want to learn the thing.
SPEAKER_02
What are some other examples that you like?
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I've seen people, there's a few people on Twitter that are like AWS. I don't know the intricacies of some of this stuff, like dissecting some facet of like Amazon AWS. You should check out Daniel Vosalo.
He's doing good numbers on Gumroad with an AWS product. And there's a few people that are...
SPEAKER_02
What's that mean, AWS product?
SPEAKER_00
Amazon Web Services. Yeah, but what's that mean a product? Oh, it's like a tutorial on how to get the most out of some facet of AWS. So it's like super niche.
And you can imagine if you wrote a book on that, you might charge a similar price for it, but the return would be significantly lower, I would imagine, unless you're with some huge publisher and you've got big reputation, but you can get into that niche and capture so much more of the revenue.
SPEAKER_02
I know people with big books. You make more money than they do.
SPEAKER_00
Right. Yeah, it's fascinating. You go direct to consumer, yeah.
SPEAKER_02
For some reason, you call it a course you could charge 299. You call it a book and at most 29.
SPEAKER_00
Right, right. That's outrageous. Yeah, $29 for a book.
Someone's life work. It's nice, yeah. This is just a slight tweak in positioning.
Obviously you can do things with a course that are slightly different than a book. You can't put a video in a book or you can't, but you can get close enough with the information. It's just, yeah, there's a different perception of it, for sure.
SPEAKER_02
What did you use to learn how to do this?
SPEAKER_00
I think it's probably a byproduct of taking a fair view and figuring out what I like and don't like when I'm learning. I also had this feedback loop with Celia, who you met, my wife. She's not a designer, so when I first did the thing, I was making the curriculum and giving it to her.
I was like, does this make sense? Can you follow this? If you had no context, would you be able to do this? Or am I missing something? So finding somebody who obviously is your target audience and making them go through it in order, and they're like, yeah, I've no clue how you got from here to here or this thing is missing. So that little feedback loop made it was instrumental. When we launched it, everyone's like, oh yeah, this makes a ton of sense.
And her feedback actually made me include stuff that I wouldn't have ever thought to include. Maybe you as the practitioner maybe don't think that point X is necessary to communicate, but you probably need to. So that's a huge part of it.
I don't, there's no official resource on how to do it, just responding, well, there will be, but I didn't use any.
SPEAKER_02
When you look at who does it best, who do you use as your North Star? First courses. Yeah, I logged into that Sam Ovens guy, consulting.com. He comes off as a scammer, but damn, his shit's good.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, it's like incredibly comprehensive. I think so much of it has to do with like learning style. Like some people want to sit through a two and a half hour like webinar style, show me the like full on philosophy principles, like the psychological breakdown of how this ad works and other people like, you know, want to read a 45 second article and understand what it is.
So it's hard to say who's doing it best because I think everybody's kind of got a different take on it. Yeah, and I still think it's, I still think it's early. When I first got into it, I was like, oh, there's so many people doing this.
You know, I've seen like thousands of different courses and feels like getting in late into the game. But when you get into that world, there aren't really, you know, there aren't that, like, there aren't a huge amount of people doing it. And if they are, they're kind of not a standalone brand.
They're using something like a teacher bull or a thinkific or it's like, they exist within this marketplace. They don't have a brand unto themselves. So a lot of those platforms dictate how the courses work versus people that are building like custom configured things based on how they like to learn.
SPEAKER_02
Is there anything that you've seen, like someone's blog or a YouTube page and you're like, man, if you had a learning component to this, your business would be significantly larger. Anything that comes to mind that's an obvious move that someone hasn't pounced on in your opinion?
SPEAKER_00
I think there's like loads of consulting businesses that could be doing this. You know, people that have like really expensive services that they sell one to one, but could have a productized version of it that exists a tenth of the price. That's essentially what we have going on now.
Specific examples, I'm thinking like a lot of skills that teach people to be like self-reliant in some way. So like creative, the ability to like, I think design is a good example. Writing is a good example.
SPEAKER_02
Writing is a popular one. My best friend, Neville, has copyrightingcourse.com. He's been doing that for 15 years, maybe 10 years, making an awesome living. Then there's that guy, Dave Perrell.
It's called the write a passage, I think it's called. I think he charges two or $4,000 to learn how to write. Writing is like a massive market.
I think your market of design is huge. I think that other markets that are huge, but they're played out a little bit is Excel. I think Excel is a little played out.
I think that the whole no-code thing still has a lot of room, like how to just hack your way through Webflow. That's kind of interesting. Yeah, there's a guy as a couple of other examples
SPEAKER_00
come to mind, there's a guy, Ezra Cohen, who sells, you've seen this guy sells like video templates on Instagram. I think he mostly runs his stuff, but I think he's doing seven figures a year selling like these pre-packaged, like creative templates and some guidance, some tutorials that go along with it. And then I think he does a lot of work with it and then I think he jumped to how to help creatives package like templatized work as the next, it's like the layer on top of that as his next course.
I don't know how he's doing with that one, but I know his template stuff was flying.
SPEAKER_02
All right, sorry. I know I'm a tease. This is the end of the episode.
If you want to hear the full thing, go to trends.co. It costs a dollar to try out. If you don't like it, just cancel and you can listen to the episode, it's a buck and you're only out a dollar.
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